Nobel Winner Schekman Boycotts Journals For 'Branding Tyranny' 106
Posted
by
timothy
from the no-thanks-you-guys dept.
from the no-thanks-you-guys dept.
An anonymous reader writes "One of this year's winners of the Nobel Peace prize has declared a boycott on leading academic journals after he accused them of contributing to the 'disfigurement' of science. Randy Schekman, who won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, said he would no longer contribute papers or research to the prestigious journals, Nature, Cell and Science, and called for other scientists to fight the 'tyranny' of the publications." And if you'd rather not listen to the sound of auto-playing ads, you'll find Schekman's manifesto at The Guardian.
crossing fingers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Journals are a symptom, not a cause (Score:5, Insightful)
Either make tenure easier to get so that professors are less likely to pursue fad or headline-grabbing science in order to achieve it, or encourage more grants to scientists that aren't affiliated with particular schools, so that they don't have to dance for their boards...
Unfortunately most major companies aren't conducting basic research like IBM, Xerox, Bell, and other big organizations did fifty+ years ago, so getting grants from big entities is harder than it once was.
Re:Journals are a symptom, not a cause (Score:5, Insightful)
According to Schekman's argument, journals --- specifically the highest-impact-factor "luxury" journals --- do play a causal rather than merely symptomatic role in the process. Such journals court papers that are "flashy," which will get lots of citations and attention (thus lots of journal subscriptions), possibly because they are wrong and focused more on attention-getting controversial claims than scientific rigor. This provides feedback on the other side of the tenure-seeking "publish or perish" culture to shape what sort of articles the tenure-seeking professors are pressured to churn out. If a scientist wants to establish their reputation by publishing ground-breaking, exciting discoveries, there's nothing a-priori wrong with that; the failure comes when joined with impact-factor-seeking journals applying distorted lower standards for scientific rigor for "attention-getting" work (while rejecting solid but "boring" research papers).
Fed up with publication pressure (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only are many (most?) academics fed up with the big journals, we are also generally fed up with publication pressure. Our school is just now going through a review. The accreditation people want number of publication. It doesn't matter what you wrote about, or whether you had anything useful to say, it's just numbers.
Who read about the University of Edinburgh physicist: He just won the Nobel prize, and has published a total of 10 papers in his entire career. As he said: today he wouldn't even get a job.
I understand that school administrations want some way to measure faculty performance. But just as student reviews are a dumb way to assess teaching quality (because demanding teachers may be rated as poorly as incompetent teachers), number of publications is a dumb way to assess research quality.
Re:crossing fingers. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:crossing fingers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Publish or perish must go (Score:5, Insightful)
"Publish or perish" is a unique pressure on mid-career academics to churn out publications. It is administrative metric that when applied can lead to career-ending outcomes for academics that are deemed "unproductive" This highly arbitrary metric looks at a number of papers published and sometimes journal impact factor, but it fails to measure scientific contribution to the field. Application of this metric linked to all kinds of scientific misconduct - from correlation fishing expeditions, to questionable practices in formulating research questions, to outright 'data cooking' and fraud.
Re:Publish or perish must go (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:crossing fingers. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that Schekman's argument is off base.
From the article (yes, I read it):
"These luxury journals are supposed to be the epitome of quality, publishing only the best research. Because funding and appointment panels often use place of publication as a proxy for quality of science, appearing in these titles often leads to grants and professorships."
His argument appears to revolve around these three high-impact journals serving as the gate keepers of "good" science. But his ire is misdirected. If funding and appointment panels are giving undue weight to publications in these journals, then THE PROBLEM LIES WITH THE FUNDING AND APPOINTMENT PANELS, not the journals.
His argument is paramount to "Scientists shouldn't publish in these journals because they're too highly regarded."
Publish or perish must go (Score:4, Insightful)
TFA's beef is with journal "prestige" (Score:5, Insightful)
IAAPGS
FWIW, while Cell and Nature are both owned by private companies, Science is run by a non-profit (the American Association for the Advancement of Science), and articles in science are made freely available two years after publication.
Having read his manifesto, I don't think his issue with with corporate publishers per se. His issue is with the culture of judging the quality of work by the prestige of the journal it was published in. That allows journals to further exploit the process; they have a large incentive to publish flashy research rather than quality research, because flashy research gets more citations -- thus making the journal more prestigious.
While I agree this is a flawed system, I'm not convinced that open-access journals are the solution; there are already more prestigious open access journals -- like Physical Review X and the New Journal of Physics (both of which are run by non-profits with prestigious, closed-access journals).
To some extent, you need both flash and quality research. I'm sure someone could do quality research on the physics of navel lint trapping, but pretty much no one would care; the research isn't interesting, and it wouldn't be worth the effort to peer review. So, for better or worse, I don't think the flashy factor will or should totally go away, although I agree it should be reduced.
That said, I am a fan of open-access journals, but I need something to publish first. I guess I should get back to research and stop wasting time with Slashdot posts....
Re:crossing fingers. (Score:5, Insightful)
What randoms unidentified bloggers think about publishing has no bearing whatsoever on what scientists think about scientific publishing. Publishing online does not necessitate that peer review be dispensed with. I've not ever met an academic, be it in the sciences or elsewhere, who ever argued that print peer-reviewed publications should be replaced by online publications that are not peer reviewed.
You're attacking a strawman.
Re:Publish or perish must go (Score:5, Insightful)